flowered. These stories are not directly
derived from the beast-fable, altho his mastery of that literary pattern
may have helped the author to find his final form. They are a
development from one of his own tales, 'In the Rukh,' included at first
in 'Many Inventions,' and now transferred to its proper place at the end
of the book in which the adventures of Mowgli are recorded. In that
first tale, which is now the last, we have set before us the impression
Mowgli and his little brothers, the wolves, made upon two white men in
the Indian service; and incidentally we are permitted to snatch a
glimpse or two of Mowgli's youth in the jungle. But the story is told
from the point of view of these white men; and it is small wonder that
when the author came to look again at what he had written he saw how
rich it was in its possibilities. He was moved to go back to narrate the
whole series of Mowgli's adventures from the very beginning, with Mowgli
himself as the center of the narrative and with little obtrusion of the
white man's civilization.

There was invention in this early story, and imagination also, altho not
so abundant. But as the author brooded over the incidents of Mowgli's
babyhood there in the thick of the forest, in the midst of the beasts,
whose blood-brother he became, suddenly his imagination revealed to him
that the jungle and all its inhabitants must be governed by law, or else
it was a realm of chaos. It is this portrayal of wild life subject to an
immitigable code which gives its sustaining moral to the narrative of
Mowgli's career. As Mr. Kipling said to me once, "When I had found the
Law of the Jungle the rest was easy!" For him it may have been easy,
since his invention is ever fresh and fertile; but the finding of the
Law of the Jungle--that transcended mere invention with all its
multiplied ingenuities--that was a stroke of imagination.

This distinction between imagination and invention may not be as
important as that between imagination and fancy urged by Wordsworth a
century ago; and no doubt there is always danger in any undue
insistence upon catchwords, which are often empty of meaning, and which
are sometimes employed to convey a misleading suggestion. This
distinction has its own importance, however, and it is not empty or
misleading. It needs to be accepted in art as it has been accepted in
science, in which domain a fertile discovery is recognized as possible
only to the imagination, while a